As readers may have guessed from previous posts, my brewing interests are minimally conventional. Fortunately, the Basic Brewing Radio podcast seems to regularly expand well beyond the usual “fermented malt flavored with a tisane of hops” thing (I need to try to make my own “Ginger Beer Plant” from scratch one of these days…). A couple of weeks ago, they did an episode covering an experiment on aeration methods which was very interesting. It does my ego good to know that I correctly guessed how the results would turn out. You can get a copy of the nice write-up of the experiment itself here, but here’s the simple version:
Category: Play With It
As a neotonous species, we humans retain our juvenile taste for play.
Things in this category are at least partly just for fun or humorous effect.
Lake-spanking map and pictures
Lake Conroe has been persistently naughty. Since nobody else seemed to be taking responsibility for its misbehavior, we took matters into our own hands yesterday and gave it a good spanking. I paddled it until I got blisters.
I think this will need to be done much more often, since I don’t think the lake has learned its lesson yet. On the other hand, I learned a few – interactive photo-map and details below…
Mountain Dew® Wine: Disappointment strikes!
<whine excuse=”obligatory”>Have I ever mentioned what a huge hassle it is to relocate from one abode to another 1600 miles away?…</whine>
I’m finally back at House v1.0 where I can check on the progress of my Mountain Dew® Wine. It appears to have managed to ferment, in spite of the severe dose of preservatives in the stuff designed to prevent that from happening. It went somewhat slowly, but it’s gone from an original gravity of around 1.054 down to about 1.011 or so, suggesting about, say, 5-6% alcohol in the final product, which has faded to a pale, cloudy yellow color. Hopefully the cloudiness is from still-living yeast, which has now demonstrated that it is reasonably benzoic-acid-and-caffeine tolerant.
I fear I must report that the result is a crushing disappointment to me. It’s not very good. Worse yet, it’s not very bad, either. I was hoping that if it wasn’t surprisingly tasty that it would at least be shockingly awful in some interesting way so I’d have something entertaining to say about it here.
Actually, the adjective that comes to mind is “inoffensive”. If you would like to whip up a quick simulation of what I’ve got here, you might be able to do it like this: Take some citrus-flavored sparkling mineral water. Dilute it about half with (uncarbonated) distilled water. Then mix about 7 volumes of that with one volume of vodka. What I’ve got here is slightly sparkling, with a barely noticeable citrus flavor and little or no remaining sweetness. It’s a little surprising to me just how much of the flavor of Mountain Dew® apparently comes from its sweetness. Perhaps next time I try this (if there ever IS a “next time”…) I’ll have to mix regular and “diet” Mountain Dew® – with some bonus sugar to make up the difference, of course.
I’m not completely done here. I’m still going to dispense it into cleaned bottles with a little bit of sugar to prime it for full carbonation. Sanitized plastic soda-bottles of course – none of that snobby glass stuff for this here experimental drinkin’ substance! It may be high-class for “pruno”, but it’s sure as heck not Champagne™. (Besides, I want to evaluate reusing plastic bottles anyway – it’d be a lot easier to tell when there’s too much pressure and to let some of the pressure off if there is.) Plus, I need to take some of the still-live yeast and keep it alive. No point in developing a benzoic-acid-tolerant yeast strain and not keeping it!
On a related note, an article was mentioned on fark.com, saying that back in 1955, a scientist “proved” that it is not normally possible to get drunk on beer. Of course, he seems to have been referring to dilute mass-market bladderwash and his reasoning was that a typical human stomach cannot contain enough 3.7%-alcohol beer for a typical human to achieve a dangerous blood-alcohol level.
As usual, the articles (see here and here) go for the “a scientist says this” part but never bother to say WHERE the scientist says it – usually a real scientific publication.
A quick search of pubmed turns up a likely candidate:
Greenberg LA: “The definition of an intoxicating beverage.” Q J Stud Alcohol. 1955 Jun;16(2):316-25 (link goes to the pubmed entry, which has little more information that this).
I do believe it is a moral imperative that I get a copy of this article somewhere so that I may reference it later. Is there anyone out there reading this who might be able to get a copy of this paper somewhere for me? Please?…
Asterisk® is our Friend
I suppose this is slightly off the usual topics for this blog, but what the heck.
Asterisk® software is an open-source system for computer telephone stuff. Yes, I did just say “telephone stuff” instead of “PBX, VoIP, and Telephony”. Cope. Anyway, it’s an entirely legally-free (aside from the cost of a computer and any desired additional equipment) replacement for the kinds of many-thousands-of-dollars proprietary software systems that your cable TV and telephone companies use to prevent you from talking to human beings on the phone (so they can fire most of them, and outsource the rest to India or the Philipines or Florida or China or whatever other “developing” area has cheap low-grade labor). In other words, they seem to use their telephony system mainly for telephony prevention. The fact that “The Man™” uses the power of a PBX for evil in this way shouldn’t trick you into thinking that having your own is a bad thing, though. For example, my Minister of Domestic Affairs was recently in Australia for work. Since calls back to the US on the cellphone cost $1.50/minute, I set up a voice-over-IP client on her computer before she left. She could then use her computer’s internet connection to connect to the Asterisk box at no extra cost. The Asterisk box could then forward her Voice-Over-IP call out our residential phone line to my cellphone – a local call for the Asterisk box. No $1.50/minute for “The Man™”! Take that, The Man!
(Oh, “PBX”? That’s Private Branch eXchange. It’s a fancy way of saying it’s your own personal robotic Ernestine the Operator for your house or office.)
I discovered Asterisk a few years ago and have been puttering with it off and on. I figured if I wanted to learn how to use it, it’d be a good, simple start to replace my answering machine with it. It was a little trickier than I thought. I got my hands on a working “X100P“-type card, which is really just a specific variety of cheap voice-modem that was used originally for early development of Asterisk prior to the fancier hardware being developed. This connects my Asterisk box to the phone line. Like my old answering machine, it shares the line with an ordinary telephone that it doesn’t control.
Googling turned up all kinds of information on getting Asterisk to answer the phone and do all kinds of amazing tricks, but not a lot about controlling the answering in the first place. I wanted it to act like my old answering machine. It wasn’t answering the phone and taking messages that was hard to figure out, it was getting it to not answer the phone if someone in the house beat Asterisk to it.
I couldn’t find any references to this anywhere online at the time (and still can’t, actually, though they may be out there). Asterisk doesn’t seem to have any way – at least not with the X100P – to explicitly detect when another device picks up the shared line, but I came up with a workaround.
Now, when the lines starts ringing, I have Asterisk wait 11 seconds (which works out to about 3 rings) before doing anything. Then, I have it explicitly check for one more second to see if the line is still ringing. If not, the assumption is that someone picked up the phone and Asterisk leaves it alone. If it DOES detect one more ring, it picks and and carries on with whatever incoming-call magic I feel like programming into it – like detecting and saving incoming faxes. A copy of the relevant portion of my dialplan for any other Asterisk users out there who care may be found at the end of the post.
Once the house-hunting frenzy I’m in the middle of dies down, I’d like to start adding some nerdier features. For example, we’re moving to Southeast Texas, where there are occasional tornado warnings. Apparently, the National Weather Service’s warnings online contain embedded geographic information defining the boundaries of the warning area. I could have Asterisk watch the warnings page, and call my cellphone to tell me if I have to worry about tornadoes or not. (Kind of silly, I know…). It’d also be nice to finally test the fax reception that hypothetically is set up to work on my Asterisk box, too. (Dang crippled Motorola cellphones won’t let me fax despite supposedly supporting Class 1 fax mode, among other missing features…But that’s another post for another time.)
And now, the dialplan (or fragment thereof) (Update 20080523, fixed missing “]” after “[incoming”):
[incoming] ;give time to allow for someone to pick up 'regular' phone before asterisk does exten => s,1,Wait(11) ;pause to check for one last ring, just in case someone picks up at the last second exten => s,n,WaitForRing(1) ;So, you get 11 seconds - about 3 rings - to answer the phone. ;after that, Asterisk waits one more second for another ring. ;obviously if someone has picked up the phone before then, ;that last ring will never come and Asterisk will leave the call alone. ;otherwise, answer the phone: exten => s,n,Answer() ;supposedly this will correctly jump to the fax extension if it's an incoming fax ;give announcement that ain't nobody here.. ;(after waiting 3 seconds in case of fax tone detection) exten => s,n,Wait(3) exten => s,n,Background(nobody-but-chickens) ;...then go to 'leave a message' like a normal (if extremely powerful) answering machine exten => s,n,Voicemail(9000) exten => s,99,Hangup() ;end of line for now
Any questions?…
I has a books.
I also has a bad grammar (curse you, internet!)
It’s slow going trying to get the mess up here in Idaho organized in preparation for the move to Texas, but I did manage to sacrifice a large number of my old books that I no longer need. Trading them in at the local representative of the “Hastings” bookstore chain got me a decent amount of store credit, and I was able to special-order this wine microbiology book I’ve been lusting after for months. It showed up a couple of days ago.
Very interesting so far, but I’m only a little ways into it. I’m still in the theory sections, so I can’t say if it covers yeast-mating or not (see previous two posts on this blog…)
Prior to that, I picked up a book I found at the local brewing-supply place in The Woodlands, Texas. It’s an entire book on the subject of Belgian and “Belgian-style” beers (like Lambic) fermented with “wild” yeasts and bacteria. It’s an excellent mix of history, science, travelogue, and “how-to”. I highly recommend it.
I noted with particularly nerdly glee that there are several breweries here in the U.S. doing non-traditional brewing cultures. At least one was brewing entirely with Brettanomyces yeasts! (Most traditional brewers and vintners shriek in horror at the thought of Brettanomyces in their brew instead of the standard Saccharomyces yeasts, blaming Brettanomyces for – you guessed it – “off-flavors“.)
That is so amazingly spiffy I can hardly stand it. I note that one of them appears to be only a few hours from the area we’re moving to. And two of them are in Colorado, more or less on the road between Idaho and Texas, so on my next trip down which is likely to be as early as next week, I may have to try to arrange to visit at least one of them and see if I can get a tour.
I should be getting more done…
Im Name des Nudelmonster! It’s been over a week since my last post!
“Someone” seems to have located a replacement original disk of a game I had many years ago (but lost when I loaned it to someone) and bought it for me. Now, in addition to a variety of issues I need to deal with related to moving over the next few months, I have this delightfully surreal old computer game beckoning at me. ARGH! MAKE IT STOP!
Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to put together topics for next week’s “Just Science 2008”. We’ll find out who, besides me, is interested in fermentation once it starts. I think I’ll have to start off the series with a post on evolution, however, since it really does play a fundamental role when it comes to yeast culture. I also think I may be able to work JellO® into at least one of the posts, too…
Internet connection will be spotty the rest of this week as we travel towards the area that is to be our New Home, but I should have posts assembled in time for next week.
If I get a chance, there will hopefully be at least one more Geostrings post, possibly with a sample mp3 and/or Ogg/Vorbis audio file.
Was I abducted by aliens? Or am I just full of $#!+?
You’re not going to believe what happened to us. Last night, we were sleeping in our trailer in Albuquerque, NM, minding our own business. Then, towards morning, this bright orange light came up over the horizon. I remember later being transported in some kind of metal craft. Next thing I know, it’s four hours later and I’m standing hundreds of miles from where I was the night before, near a place where a UFO was previously reported!.
I want to emphasize here that I’m not just making this up – everything I said in that paragraph is completely true…
Yes, today we found ourselves mysteriously transported to the “Dairy Capital of the Southwest”.
Yes, the one from the Futurama episode. Though they didn’t talk much about cows in that one.
Besides, for some reason I get the impression that milk isn’t necessarily the most popular beverage here. Indeed, I get the impression that the dairy products around here are more industrial in nature. Heck, if you ask Google Maps for “cheese in Roswell, NM”, all that comes up is mass-market manufacturer “Leprino Foods”. What, not even any stores selling “moon cheese” to cash in on the whole UFO/Space-alien thing? Perhaps they only keep the cattle around to give the space-aliens something to practice their probing on.
With no prospects for sampling the apparently nonexistent famous regional cheeses, there was only one thing left to do. Yes, I admit it, we went to the UFO Museum (“and Research Center”).
I feel compelled to give them high praise on at least one point: they have signs which declare cameras and other recording gear to be explicitly permitted. A refreshing change after visiting the otherwise impressive Museum of Wildlife Art a few weeks back in Jackson, WY, which loudly forbade “cameras and cellphones”. Because, heaven forbid a blurry image taken by a cellphone of a painting which escaped copyright several centuries ago be seen on the internet without paying an additional fee. This would certainly cause the museum to collapse in bankruptcy within days.
But I digress…
Built into what appears to have once been an old single-screen movie theater building, it was well worth some touristy amusement. Ironically, I didn’t see a whole lot that I actually wanted to take pictures of. I did derive a certain amount of amusement from taking a picture of the framed photograph they had of a sign from Area 51 saying “no photography in this area”…but, appropriately enough, it came out too blurry to be verifiable. I suspect interference to my digital camera due CIA mind-control rays reflected from my Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie.
It was actually kind of like a text-heavy art museum. Virtually all of the displays were framed photographs or copies of documents, though they do have, for example, what is apparently an authentic 1950’s USAF falling-from-great-heights test dummy on loan from somewhere. They still have lots of open space left, which is probably why they went ahead and filled one section with someone’s exhaustive and yet still laughable display on “crop circles”. Oddly enough, the portions dedicated to the actual “Roswell incident” aren’t bad. As you can imagine, I thought the presentation was still a bit overly credulous, but it was nowhere near what I had expected, which was a “balanced” presentation as favored by our mainstream media – that is, something along the lines of “could it be a crashed alien spaceship covered up by a secret government conspiracy, or merely this ridiculous story about a weather balloon?”. Instead, it looks like they’ve just collected as much as they could in the way of newspaper clippings, photographs, affidavits, reports, hypotheses (including, yes, the whacky ones) and so forth, and tried to present them all.
There was one really spooky thing I saw in there though:
This map near the entrance is for visitors to mark where they’ve come from. I immediately noticed the odd clustering that seems to run from New Mexico, curving up through Texas, and up to Illinois. I mentioned this to my Minister of Domestic Affairs, who happens to be a geophysicist with a Ph.D. “Tornado Alley“, she immediately recognized and pointed out to me.
You all see, dear readers, where I’m going with this, don’t you? It’s so obvious:
- Tornadoes love trailer parks, right?
- What’s the stereotype of the kind of person who sees UFO’s or is abducted by aliens? The kind of people who are assumed to live in trailer parks, right?
- All those blurry photos of UFO’s come from devices for recording visual images, like, say, camcorders. Right?
- And, finally, it is a scientifically documented fact[1] that the occurence of tornadoes can be correlated to the combination of camcorder sales and trailer park presence.
- This proves space-aliens cause tornadoes, perhaps to flush potential abductees out of hiding.
THEREFORE
I eagerly await further research on my groundbreaking hypothesis.
Meanwhile, what’s a museum without a gift-shop, where fine and tasteful products may be purchased?
Uh…or maybe not.
On a final note, I must say I approve of their unattended-child policy, though I have to admit I like the “free puppy and an espresso” one better.
[1] Wu F:”TORNADOES AND TRAILER PARKS: A STATISTICAL CORRELATION” Ann. Imp. Res.; Jul/Aug 1995 (1:4); pp 26-27 (also available online here).
Proposed format(s) for geotagging arbitrary types of media
Yet more thoughts on geotagging – here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
The format needs to handle only two fundamental data types – points and polygons. It also obviously needs to handle “lines” or tracks, but those are made of “points”. Polygon, for my purposes, might be unnecessary and I’m not sure if I should leave it in. I’m reluctant to leave it out – that way you could easily georeference media to a building or field’s outline, for example. On the other hand, I’m trying to keep this format terse and concise – I’m not trying to merely embed .gpx or .kml files in things.
A “point”, as I am thinking of defining it here, is made of up to seven attributes (more or less in order of importance): a latitude/longitude pair, elevation, timestamp, track-ID, heading, and angle. A polygon is the same, except that it contains a list of at least three lat/lon/optional-elevation sets. It still only has a single timestamp, though, just like a “point”. I suppose in some odd cases one could even define a track as a series of polygons – defining the field of view in a video taken from the bottom of an airplane that’s taking off, for example.
Leaving aside the question of polygons for now, I’m envisioning two possible formats which I will arbitrarily name “geotag” (XML-type) and “geostring”(simple text) for the moment.
I picture a geotag entry looking something like this:
<geotag:point lat="41.228063" lon="-115.058119" elev="1720.901m" datetime="20071115T143000-06" trackid="1" heading="340" angle="-5.0">Metropolis Hotel</geotag:point>
In this format, the optional description of the point is between the opening and closing tags there. “lat” and “lon” might be better as a single “latlon” or “coord” attribute, with the latitude and longitude separated by commas (i.e. <geotag:point coord="41.228063,-115.058119">:</geotag:point>)
A “geotring” point might look something like this instead:
geostring:point:41.228063:-115.058119:1720.901m:20071115T143000-06:1:340:-5.0:geostring
Not sure if the closing “geostring” is really necessary here, but it would make backwards-compatibility easier if fields were added to future revisions. As with the geotag, it might be better to treat the lat/lon pair (the only mandatory information for a minimal “point” definition) as a single field, so the minimal “geotag” example above done as a “geostring” would look something like: geostring:41.228063,-115.058119::::::geostring
Even as I write this, I find myself leaning towards combining the latitude and longitude into a single field, if for no other reason than it means each point only has one required field. Either way, I currently think the fields ought to be defined thus:
- latitude and longitude are decimal degrees. Either may be prefixed by a + or – (lat: +=”Northern Hemisphere”, -=”Southern Hemisphere”, Lon: +=East, -=West) – if neither is there, + will be assumed. Latitude and longitude are required for every point.
- Elevation may be suffixed by “m” or “f” (for “meters” or “feet”). If neither is specified, meters are assumed.
- Timestamp is in the ISO 8601 “basic format”. If neither “Z” or an offset from UTC are specified, “the viewer’s local time” should be assumed (which is kind of silly, but it still would allow one to synchronize a track with, say, an audio recording or video.)
- trackid is any arbitrary alphanumeric term with a maximum of, say, 16 characters (is that enough?) Any points with the same trackid are assumed to be part of the same track. If unspecified, the point is assumed to be unrelated to any other points (if any exist) that may be in the same file.
- Heading is in decimal degrees from 0 to 360. This represents facing a particular (horizontal) direction from the point in question. “Which direction the camera was pointing” in the case of a photograph.
- Angle is in decimal degrees from -90 to 90. This represents an angle above or below the current elevation at that point (for a picture, this would represent the upward or downward angle that the camera was pointing when the picture was taken.)
Hmmm, if I shorten “geostring” to “geostr” and either eliminate the “data type” field (“point”) or just reduce it to a single letter, that entire and complete “geostring” example would fit even into a single tiny 64-character comment field, if there are any file formats still floating around limited to that kind of small metadata size.
My main goal here is to make it easy to create files tagged with this information. So long as it’s easily read and not likely to get separated from the file it describes, using the data for anything ought to be easy, even if one has to do it “by hand”. As was mentioned on the “Into the Pudding” blog (found via the GeoRSS blog), having applications that can read metadata is useless if nobody’s putting the metadata in their files to begin with. If an acceptable format can be worked out, I intend to start making as much georeferenced information available as possible.
Who’s with me? Comments, suggestions, offers of patronage, anyone?
More on geotagging
Some good comments came up in the last post on georeferencing. I thought a followup post was
merited.
The itch I’m trying to scratch here is that I want to be able to georeference just about any kind of data,
and I want to be able to embed the georeference information directly in the data file, whether it’s a
graphic, or audio, or video, or gene sequence data, or anything else. I want to have a standard form for tagging any of these files. And I don’t want to store the location metadata in a separate file.
What I think I need, then, is a standard, simple way of making geographic notations in a terse, concise format that is both easily parsed by and readily recognizeable to a computer, is reasonably human readable, and can be made to fit just about anywhere that arbitrary text is allowed.
Right now, there are only two types of files that have some way of embedding geographic information into them that I know of. The obvious one is that EXIF data in JPEG files can contain “GPS” tags. For hardcore GIS people, GeoTIFF is the other one. Both are for photographs or other still-image data only. What about the rest?
A variation of one of the current geotagging XML formats like the W3C (“<geo:lat>41.4354840</geo:lat><geo:lon>-112.6660845</geo:lon>”) or GeoRSS is an obvious possibility. XML has two potential problems though, as I see it. First, it’s not very terse – the markup substantially increases the amount of space the information takes up. I think in most cases that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but I suspect there are a few file formats out there with only comparatively small spaces set aside for a “comment” or “description” field.
The second potential “problem” is something odd that occurred to me today: it’s hard to pronounce out loud. There are some popular audio formats (e.g. “.wav”) that as far as I know have no space whatsoever for arbitrary text…but if my little standard was something that could be distinctly spoken, someone making a recording could literally speak the metadata in a format that a speech-to-text engine (like Sphinx) might be able to recognize and convert to a compatible string of text which could be parsed just like data from anywhere else. This is something of a corner case, I admit, but I think it’s at least worth considering.
Another good point that came up was what you do if your data extends beyond a single point. For example, if I want to georeference an audio recording I might make while narrating what I’m seeing out the window of a speeding train, it makes good sense to at least try to store line segments rather than just a point. That way, if someone wants to find the spot within a several-mile stretch where I suddenly exclaim “Hey, wow, look at that!” they can. The ability to define areas with a polygon or a point-and-radius seems like it would be handy, too, though obviously much more optional.
So, let’s see, I’m looking for a format with minimal markup, but which is easily recognized, is made of plain text which could be crammed into, say, a PNG tEXt chunk, an mp3 comment frame, a Genbank “Source” field, or any other field which allows arbitrary text. I want a form that’s minimally objectionable to anyone else who might be willing to use it. And I think I want it to be able handle points consisting of at least latitude, longitude, optional elevation, optional timestamp, and possibly even an optional heading and angle, and can handle more than one point per file (for the case of lines). Am I forgetting anything?
Besides “going to bed before 3am”?
I want to geotag something besides photographs!
For no particular reason, here is a picture of The Dog in her natural habitat. This picture really has nothing to do with today’s blog post, but since this is supposed to be a happy time of year, I suppose a happy picture is in order.
In case anyone is wondering if I’ve forgotten the supposed microbiological emphasis on this blog, the answer is no. In fact, I’ve got a post on amateur yeast culture brewing, but I’m still researching it a bit.
Meanwhile, it seems reasonable to post about geolocation, which after all is an important and useful trick for associating information with its place in The Big Room.
Geolocation of photographs is well established, at least for JPEG images. There are standard ways of tagging a JPEG file with an ICBM address, and I’ve been having a lot of fun doing this with my own pictures. (If you’re bored, you can browse them on Panoramio, and perhaps in a few weeks may stumble on some of them in Google Earth.)
There doesn’t appear to be any standard way of tagging other forms of media files, though. What if I want to geotag an .mp3 or OGG/Vorbis audio file recorded at a particular spot? Or a “DivX/Xvid” or OGG/Theora video?
Irritatingly, it seems as though a few people have mused about it, but nobody seems to have addressed it. There are projects like The Freesound Project which does geolocate sounds, but the geographic information is not actually embedded into the sound files in any way. As far as I can tell, the location is tracked in their own server’s database only. A Google search turned up a post on the “Random Connections” Blog musing about this, but the only application mentioned is adding georss tags to the RSS for a podcast feed, not to the podcast’s audio file itself. Even the otherwise excellent Mapping Hacks book (written before O’Reilly’s current decline into yet another “Proprietary Product® How-To Guides” publisher over the last couple of years) mentions the topic in Hack #59, but disappointingly appears to have really had nothing to do with tagging files so much as “interpolating a position from a GPS track, given a timestamp”.
This all comes up because we’re about to go on a roadtrip to check out a part of the country where we seem likely to end up living next year. I’ve been told I’ve got a pretty good voice, so I was considering generating a travelogue series along the way. It appears to be relatively easy to generate a “narrated picture” as a standard mp3 file, the picture being loaded as though it were “album art”. The only aspect of the whole thing that’s missing is geolocation. For now, just being able to easily obtain the ICBM address associated with the file while playing it so that one could plug the coordinates into Google Maps to see where the recording was done, but ideally I’d like to do it in a way that could be considered standardized, so that later on people might be encouraged to add geolocalization plugins to their media-playing software.
Sure, I can just generate a .kml file with a track of where we were, with markers containing picture and audio links. In fact, I probably will, but I don’t want people to have to use Google Maps or Google Earth to make use of the geolocation information associated with the audio.
Any suggestions, anyone?